A NinjaVideo administrator who once podcasted fiery sermons against Hollywood …

Hana Beshara, the co-founder and public face of the NinjaVideo movie-sharing site, has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement. Each count carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.

According to the government, Beshara has admitted to personally earning more than $200,000 from operating the site, and she has agreed to forfeit assets seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year.

Beshara served as the public face of NinjaVideo under the alias "Phara." She was a regular presence on NinjaVideo discussion forums. In a podcast episode that she called NinjaVideo's manifesto, she acknowledged that people mostly come to the site for "zero hour releases of TV and movies," but she argued sharing copyrighted films was justified by the large profits of Hollywood studios. "Every year, those at the top of your business get richer and richer. And we, your loyal fans, pay more and more to view two hours of regurgitated plot," she said.

Beshara said that "we weave and we bob through these grey areas of laws not yet written." But the feds evidently didn't agree that NinjaVideo was operating in a legal grey area. Beshara's condo was raided in June 2010. In a video posted in June 2011, on the one-year anniversary of that raid, she said she "wanted to go viral" at that point, but that she stayed quiet about the ongoing investigation on the advice of her lawyers.

"We're not going to be silent any more," she said in June 2011, promising a series of videos. She said that running NinjaVideo "was the proudest, and still is the proudest, accomplishment of my life" and called on the NinjaVideo community to support her.

Her next video was released shortly after she was indicted. In it, Beshara seemed weary and frightened but determined to fight on.

"You try to do right. It's so hard to balance your principles and what you want to do against the fear of retribution from the federal government. So please don't ever think us cowardly," she said.

"I'm really private, but this can't be private any more because it affects all of us," she said. "We believe in sharing, and I'm going to fight this fight for us. I don't believe anything that we ever did was wrong."

Beshara evidently changed her mind about fighting the charges after one of her co-defendants pled guilty a few days ago. Faced with mounting legal bills and bleak prospects for vindication in the courtroom, she cut a deal with federal prosecutors. She'll be sentenced in January.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.